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Human Rights Watch charged Tuesday that new Defense Department tribunals to review combatant status will not give detainees at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a fair chance to challenge their detention. The tribunals, which could begin this week, "are seriously flawed," the rights group said in a statement. "They are not set up to be impartial, they will place severe limits on detainees' ability to make their claims, and they are predicated on the Pentagon's erroneous belief that all enemy combatants at Guantanamo can still be held under the laws of war," it added. The status review tribunals, consisting of three military officers, will review the available facts about each detainee to determine whether he is being lawfully held as an enemy combatant. Detainees can testify and present witnesses or affidavits on their own behalf, and they can avail themselves of assistance from a "personal representative," a military officer who is not a lawyer and is not bound by any rules of confidentiality. They will not have access to classified information in their files, but their representative is supposed to give them an unclassified explanation of the case against them. The Pentagon created the process after Supreme Court rulings late last month raised questions about whether the prisoners have been accorded due process and affirmed their right to challenge their detention in US courts. "Human Rights Watch questions whether the status review tribunals can be genuinely neutral and impartial. The military order creating these tribunals explicitly designates the detainees as enemy combatants, consistent with the position that senior US military and administration officials have maintained for over two and a half years," the group said. "To find that a detainee is not an enemy combatant, military officers on the panel will have to accept the claims put forward by a detainee over the stated position of their superiors." All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse. Quick Links
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